Our website is temporarily offline, while a new website is under development. The launch time, is estimated to occur in early 2026.
Should you require any of the content that you recall from the old site, you can send an email to admin @ peipioneercemetery.com (remove spaces) and I will do my best to get the requested information to you.
For reasons never communicated, the current Pioneer Cemetery Committee no longer supports this website. No thank you for the thousands of hours or dollars that my wife and I have invested to provide this website was even acknowledged - just a THANK YOU, would have been greatly appreciated, but alas, no. This new Committee direction is for the best as they can avoid this distraction and can focus on their primary responsibility of maintaining the upkeep of the cemetery.
The original objective of this website, which I created in 2008 with the full support of the original Pioneer Cemetery Committee, and have since spent thousand of hours and dollars on maintaining, was to honour the ancestors in the cemetery, and also to document the amazing restoration and vision of my aunts, Anne Kells, Patricia Malone, and my mother, Helen MacDonald, and also to my father Jim MacDonald, who had the vision to clear all the brush on the back side of the cemetery to open up the amazing view of the Strait.
The original Committee Chairman, Anne Kells, who recently retired, was a strong supporter for the website. The currently Committee has chosen to take a different direction, and has declined to support a recent request to pay the annual costs for keeping the website on the internet (hosting). My wife and I did not want to see the website disappear so we paid the fees that were due. The official Committee spokesperson actually told me that they were unaware that there were costs to operate the website! There are many operational costs, and we have paid most of them since 2008, they are mostly small, but they add up, as an example, just a few days ago, I paid the annual website registration cost.
Recently, we noticed that some parts of the website had ceased to work as intended, and this was due to the aging software used to run the website. We made the difficult decision to take the website offline, and plan to build a new website from the ground up. The new website will honour their contributions and the work that was done to restore the cemetery, but the central focus will be on those families that were buried in the cemetery, and ideally, we can include information such as known family trees, etc. We also hope to include information on the "new" cemetery.
The new website, when launched will not be affiliated with the current Pioneer Cemetery Committee, as their primary focus is on maintaining the cemetery itself; we will however share any information or news that they wish to contribute, or wish to distribute to users of the site, or through our newsletter. We have also created a Facebook group that is currently not very active, but over time, it may become another method to share information.
The new website will be supported by those who wish to support it, and we have received many offers of support, although we are not yet ready to accept any donations. The St Margaret of Scotland Pioneer Cemetery is a beautiful place, and we will continue to honour it, the ancestors, and the vision of the original Pioneer Cemetery Committee.
We'll be back in early 2026.